When Fake News Targets Your Company

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A fast-moving lie can do more damage to a company’s reputation than a slow, careful truth can fix. Executives who think fake news is just a political problem are underestimating its reach and cost. Patrick Haack, professor of strategy and responsible management at HEC Lausanne, explains why traditional responses like silence or fact-checking aren’t enough. He outlines what companies should be doing instead: building credibility in advance, monitoring for signs of virality, and enlisting outside allies to push back. It’s a playbook designed not just to correct the record but to protect trust before it erodes. Haack is coauthor of the HBR article “How to Counter Fake News.”

Transcript

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0:44.2	Thank you. I'm Adi Ignatius.
1:01.5	I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR Ideacast.
1:10.2	All right, so Allison, did you know there is a social media report that says the lead article in last month's Harvard Business Review is actually a coded prophecy for the end of the world, and this thing is going crazy viral.
1:23.8	Wow, that is highly alarming. I didn't know that.
1:47.3	Well, because it, of course, didn't happen. And that's really the topic of this week's IdeaCast, fake news, and how companies can respond to it. Yeah, it's interesting because I think about this so much in the realm of politics and science, but I haven't really thought about it affecting businesses.
1:52.7	Is it pretty prevalent? Yeah, it is prevalent. I mean, it's hard to say exactly who the perpetrators are, whether it's rivals, whether it's short sellers, whether it's just trolls trying to create
1:57.1	some entertainment for themselves. You know, there's a case a few years ago, Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, was shown in
2:03.5	a video supposedly saying that by a certain year, we will reduce the number of people in the
2:08.2	world by 50%.
2:09.7	Okay, that's not a good statement, but that's not what he said.
2:12.8	What he had said was we will reduce the number of people in the world who cannot afford
2:16.9	our medicines by 50%.
2:18.3	Somebody doctored it and Pfizer had to deal with a fallout.
	...

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